Cormac is a law-school-bound young man living in a cramped apartment in New York's West Village with his financially strapped mother. Iris is a blogger, working from home in Queens, who hires "Mac" to spiff up her website. The love story that develops between them in Ken LaZebnik's drama "On the Spectrum," now at the Fountain Theatre, would be traditional to a fault were it not for a salient difference: Mac and Iris are characters with autism. Mac has Asperger's syndrome and lives a fairly mainstream life with help from his mother, who is there to nudge him when he gets stuck in one of his obsessive loops.

Ben, Chon and O are Southern California dreamers — and in Oliver Stone's upcoming film "Savages," they run right into a Mexican drug cartel nightmare. The two young men and woman at the center of Don Winslow's novel that inspired Stone's film are green-thinking Laguna Beach entrepreneurs, but rather than fabricating solar panels or organizing compost classes, the comely trio farms and sells knock-your-socks off marijuana, a hybrid weed so powerful it quickly becomes the envy of less kindhearted dealers south of the border.

Jean Smart--the star who left "Designing Women" to expand as an actress--is, to her immense credit, becoming impossible to pigeonhole. Only a month ago she was chilling as a savage serial killer in the TV movie "Overkill," and tonight she's a sweet, drawling, prim North Carolina schoolteacher thrust into the arms of a rock 'n' roll mega-star in "Just My Imagination" (at 9 p.m. on NBC, Channels 4, 36 and 39).

Zach BRAFF wanted to be a filmmaker long before he garnered fame and acclaim for his role on the popular sitcom "Scrubs." His debut as writer and director, "Garden State," in which he also stars alongside Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard and Ian Holm, takes place during a few days in which a young man returns home for his mother's funeral.

Vice President Al Gore acknowledged Sunday a "miscommunication" in leading reporters to believe he and his wife were the model for the '70s romance novel "Love Story." The author, Erich Segal, told the New York Times he was "befuddled" by the comments. He said he called Gore, who told him it was a misunderstanding. On Sunday, Gore spokeswoman Ginny Terzano borrowed a line from the book in apologizing.

The complexities that attended writer Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy's early romance aren't hard to grasp. There was the three-decade age difference, Isherwood being 49 when he met the 18-year-old Bachardy on a Santa Monica beach in 1953.

The Scene: Wednesday's premiere of Warner Bros. and Morgan Creek's "True Romance" at Mann's Chinese Theater. The movie has been dubbed "a '90s 'Bonnie and Clyde.' " To call the film violent would be an understatement. Agents attacking each other over a deal point would be tame compared to this. "It's a film that's full of surprises," said director Tony Scott. "And the real surprise, considering how much violence there is, is how much humor it has."

When Rio Hondo Elementary School lets out for summer break June 21, kindergarten teacher Doris Ann Walters will not only say goodby to her students, she will also bid farewell to the classroom in which she has taught for 38 years. About 200 colleagues and former students will honor Walters today at a retirement party at the school on East Wildflower Road in Arcadia.

Age hasn't blunted the edgy impact of "Jerker," the fiercely homoerotic one-act by the late Robert Chesley that in 1986 provoked a push for more restrictive censorship. The touring revival from Call Box Productions, currently cruising Highways, boasts enough nudity and frank sexuality to hold its own against any play in a subsequent decade of envelope-pushing gay theater.

Age hasn't blunted the edgy impact of "Jerker," the fiercely homoerotic one-act by the late Robert Chesley that in 1986 provoked a push for more restrictive censorship. The touring revival from Call Box Productions, currently cruising Highways, boasts enough nudity and frank sexuality to hold its own against any play in a subsequent decade of envelope-pushing gay theater.